Month: February 2021

by Howard Greene Governments have imposed extreme policies to contain COVID-19 infections because of public perceptions that the mortality risk is high. As the collateral damage to education, careers, routine health care, and economies grows, and as infection rates decline, it is reasonable to assess to what degree the COVID-19 mortality risk justifies continued Government intervention in normal life. It goes without saying that any unnatural death is a tragedy to be avoided. Nevertheless, in a free society, individuals make decisions every day that come with mortality risk: driving at high speeds on crowded interstate highways, or rock climbing, or ignoring the onset of serious obesity. In America, Government policy should reflect population mortality costs without trying to protect every citizen from the inevitability of death. Individuals should make decisions about risky behavior based on knowledge about their personal exposure to mortality risks. Unfortunately, bad news sells better than good news, and politicians are driven to ‘do something’. As a result, the actual population cost and individual risk of dying from COVID-19 have been lost in a fog of tragic stories and fear mongering. This paper aims to cut through that fog by answering some basic questions: What is the individual risk of being infected with SARS-CoV-2?If an individual contracts COVID-19, what is his risk of dying?How does this mortality ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes expert legal opinion on whether schools can make Covid tests mandatory (no), a brilliant dissection of Ferguson's technocratic dystopia and a Postcard From the Alps.

My stepson is a race engineer with an elite sports team employed by a major player in the motorsport industry. To protect his identity, I’ll call him ‘the Stiglet’. The team returned last Monday February 22nd having been to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to compete in a series of events held in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They were all aware before leaving the UK that because the UAE is on the Government’s ‘red list’, that they’d have to go to a Government-designated hotel and isolate for 10 days upon their return. A group of about 24 of them (circa half the team) were taken to their appointed hotel by bus; none of them were allowed to drive their own vehicles there, presumably for fear they’d do a runner. HMP Covid has four stars, is part of a major group and, as the team’s employer very generously agreed to pay the £1,750.00 bill per person, you might think – as did the Stiglet – that for that amount of money it couldn’t be all bad. Well, think again… The room given to the Stiglet was disgustingly dirty. As you can see from the two photos below, it’s covered in a layer of dust so thick that it’s obviously not been cleaned for many weeks, if not months. The third picture ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes a plea from a visitor attraction operator to open up sooner, a response to the latest Zero-Zealotry in the New Statesman and an essay on Owen Jones by a philosopher.

by Guy de la Bédoyère Those of us contribute to and read Lockdown Sceptics have had the opportunity to consider a wide range of views. There’s been a healthy debate. I’ve tried to steer something of a middle course in an effort to find common ground that might help us get out of this mess. I’ll lay my cards on the table. I am going to be vaccinated as soon as I can. That is my choice, and I am glad that it is my choice. I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road. And I doubt if anyone would want me to. If I chose freely not to have a passport then I would not be allowed to travel. So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences. I grew ...

I have a research background in the social sciences and dozens of peer-reviewed publications to my name. There’s a lot that sets off my crap detector in Ferguson’s comments – mostly to do with overestimating the validity of his own data, and using this to in effect depoliticise political questions and naturalise a kind of technocratic despotism under the guise of neutral science. I don’t think this is a deliberate conspiracy; I think it’s a predictable result of a particular way of seeing. The political assumption is that ‘we’ as a society make decisions for the whole society (i.e., society is not an aggregate of individuals), that within this range of decisions, anything goes (the only criteria are quantitative), and that the decisions should be made based on expert data. These are highly contentious beliefs: they are not apolitical or scientific. I believe lockdowns are always wrong because people are autonomous beings with a need for freedom, and acts such as threatening violence if a person leaves their home are abusive regardless of circumstances (I don’t believe there is any significant moral difference between a Government, a terrorist group, or an individual abuser making such threats, and I don’t believe the ends justify the means). But I could also cite dozens of political theories which oppose the general model that the Government should ...

Emboldened by your recent contributor's account of his upcoming trip to Miami to attend a job interview (and I wish him the best of luck), I would like to share how I and one companion were recently obliged to travel from the UK to the Alps. The envy of frustrated skiers across the nation, I'm sure – but I hope this inspires some others who may be underemployed to think outside the box when looking for work. So many essential workers put their lives on the line to keep the lights on for the rest of us that it occurred to me that I should show similar courage and do my part. With no real work at home, I decided that I was willing to step out into the virus-ravaged wastelands and risk it all. As we know, international travel is perhaps the most dangerous act of any, and so that would be how I tested my mettle.  Ideas such as ‘chalet inspector’ or ‘independent fondue taster’ seem unnecessary these days; I'm sure people can manage to taste their own fondues during a pandemic. What, though, is the field that absolutely requires travelling in person? Transport, of course – whether that's driving a coach, flying a plane or moving a lorry full of goods. Readers will remember the chaos suffered ...

by Sinéad Murphy Over a week ago, the journalist Owen Jones posted a video on his YouTube channel. Its title: “The Deniers.” I have not been a reader of Jones’s writings nor a viewer of his videos, but I have been aware of his relatively high profile as an opinion columnist and an interviewer. Nothing could have prepared me for his performance in “The Deniers”. Jones’s demeanour in this video is that of a bad-tempered child who, from the safety of his mother’s skirts, entertains himself by taunting his chosen targets – he pulls faces, he calls names, and he mocks the objects of his petulance with hand gestures and sarcasm of the most puerile variety. Jones’s victims are professional people – just like him. Among them: Professor Karol Sikora, former Chief of the Cancer Programme of the World Health Organisation; Professor Sunetra Gupta, Chair of Theoretical Epidemiology at University of Oxford; Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal’s Evidence-Based Medicine provision; and Dr Michael Yeadon, former Head of Allergy and Respiratory Research at Pfizer Global. These are the people – the ‘Deniers’ – at whom Jones makes his faces and levels his taunts. More than once, he uses his hands to place notional quotation marks around Karol ...

Today’s update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. We hear that US states which locked down had MORE Covid deaths (see graph), Toby tells us about his talkRADIO debate with Christopher Snowdon, and the latest vaccine news.

by Neville Hodgkinson Lockdown Sceptics contributor Guy de la Bédoyère gave powerful testimony this week about the inhumanity inherent in the global hysteria surrounding COVID-19.  Following his post here on Tuesday reporting the death in a care home at the weekend of his 100-year-old mother-in-law, BBC Radio 4’s World at One listeners heard him describe coolly but movingly the tragedy of her last days and months.   She did not die of Covid and did not have dementia.  She was mentally alert to the end, and acutely aware of what she had been denied through the brutal isolation, as Guy put it, imposed by lockdown laws for the sake of keeping her ‘safe’.   In her last year of life she never saw her four great-grandchildren, had only one or two fleeting visits from grandchildren, and was unable to hug or hold her one surviving child.   It was a “hideous punishment”, Guy wrote.  “That it has come to this, that we as a society and led by the Government and its scientific advisers with the willing acquiescence of organisations and individuals have done so much to commit the ultimate act of betrayal towards people at the end of their lives will surely go down in history as one of the most ignoble and demeaning aspects of this tragic year.” Since the ...